An Unexpected Way Your Age Could Be Impacting Who Targets You on Facebook

Lauren Zoltick, Senior Content StrategistPosted on September 12, 2018

A lot of people use social media. A lot of brands use social media to target those social media users with ads.

We know this.

As a Senior Strategist here at ISL, I’m often working with our team on setting up audiences on social to target for our ad content. We use a wide variety of parameters from age and location to interests and brand affinities to ensure we are hitting the right target. Brand affinities and interests are based on your actions, the things you post, and the pages you like on Facebook.

Like many of you, I joined Facebook in high school. I was 15 years old in 2004 when the social network became popular at my school. I quickly set up a profile. I wanted to make sure everyone knew I was interested in cool stuff like Grey’s Anatomy and dance music.

Now, 14 years later, here we are. It’s 2018 and I’m 29 and despite not having watched Grey’s since college, I have not removed Grey’s Anatomy or “dance music” from my current list of liked pages. Proof:

For good measure, I wanted to make sure this was not just me. It was not.

While a few folks had almost no likes and others had clearly “purged” their profile, the majority of my friends and peers of a similar age had profiles riddled with early and mid-2000s throwback likes. Below are some amazing (but painfully outdated) choices.

So what does this mean?

My explanation is two-fold:

1. Users are increasingly curating their Instagram profiles, while very few Facebook users are editing their Facebook likes and interests. Meaning, for many, there’s an accumulation of outdated page likes collecting dust since they joined the network years ago.

2. Depending on when you joined Facebook, or rather when Facebook became popular for your generation, it’s likely that the timing of that has an impact on what pages you liked, and therefore how you are targeted.

So, do Facebook Advertisers and yourself a favor, make sure your page likes reflect your current interests, and not high school you. If you need me, that’s exactly what I’ll be doing.